Black Friday Customer Service: Tips to Handle Increased Holiday Queries

Updated on November 12, 2024

Customers eagerly wait for holiday deals to spend money on the latest products. For example, in the holiday season (Nov 1 – Dec 31) of 2023, U.S. consumers spent over $240 billion cashing in on the latest deals.

This money ($9.8 billion!) was spent on Black Friday alone.

Now that Black Friday is only weeks away, you must have prepared a laundry list of discounts and marketing campaigns! This article is a similar checklist built for customer service teams to help them deal with increased holiday queries. 

We’re going to cover:

1. Black Friday Sales Timing

2. Why Focus on Customer Service?

3. How to Improve Customer Service During Black Friday?

4. Summary

When is Black Friday?

In 2024, Black Friday is scheduled for 29th November. Most retailers will be holding sales through the Black Friday weekend. 

Most businesses will start their sales at midnight on 29th November and continue till the end of Cyber Monday on 2nd December. 

This weekend will increase customer queries to businesses as people try to grab the best deals possible. Here’s where your customer service preparedness will help; let’s discuss why in the next section. 

Why Should You Focus on Customer Service for Black Friday?

Most businesses draw up detailed inventory and operations to deal with Black Friday sales. However, as the number of customers increases for a few days, preparing for the increased volume of customer service questions takes a lot of work. 

But, customer service is the key to creating a better customer experience and:

1. 59% of U.S. customers will stop using a brand after multiple bad experiences.
2. 87% of Gen Z and 89% of millennials are willing to pay more for better customer service experiences.
3. 73% of customers think customer experience is essential when purchasing.

This is why the biggest businesses pull out all the stops to prepare tier customer service teams for the holidays. We’re here to help you achieve the same with the ultimate Black Friday customer service checklist. Let’s start!

How to Improve Customer Service During Black Friday?

1. Drive a Fast and Personalized Customer Experience

90% of customers say they buy more from brands that personalize their experience. So, Black Friday is a great time to offer personalized customer experiences. 

There are multiple ways to improve customer service with personalization:

• Leverage Customer Visit Data – You can get data on the pages your customers visit the most and how they use your website through an analytics tool. Use this data to provide them with proactive information about the products they view. 
• Personalize Support with a Chatbot – Letting your customer directly inquire about their purchases without navigating to another page is helpful. Use an AI chatbot to immediately provide answers about order status, shipping IDs, and more.
• Provide Fast Answers – You compete with thousands of other retailers on Black Friday. Reduce the time it takes for your support team to answer a question by training a FAQ chatbot that can help them make a purchase. 

Doing this stuff is pretty simple in practice. You just need an integrated analytics tool (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc) and an AI chatbot. With minor data tweaks and fine-tuning, you can provide faster and more personalized customer experiences for Black Friday. 

2. Provide Accurate Information to Customers

Remember that you want your customers to be as worry-free as possible while purchasing. So, they should have all the information they need about your products at their fingertips when they try to buy a product.

So, you should have the following things listed prominently:

• Provide a Detailed SLA (Service Level Agreement) – Outline every service you provide clearly. Tell customers about the shipping dates, possible color variations, and other things that might concern them about your products. Being open and honest about the products and services your customers will receive goes a long way in winning them over. 
• Write Detailed Product Descriptions – While AI chatbots will help you answer FAQ-based questions, product descriptions will help them choose the right product faster. With the correct details, you can also train your chatbot to provide the proper recommendations to your customers. 
• Provide Proactive Answers – Aside from product descriptions, you can also add specific FAQ sections to your product pages to help reduce the inquiries that your customer service teams receive. 

Being more descriptive and proactive about the information you provide to your customers will create a more robust customer experience. This will also ensure that your customers have ready access to relevant information on every page. 

3. Be Open About Operations – Returns, Shipping and Exchanges

While customers will splurge during the Black Friday sales, many expect prompt service immediately. Since your order volumes will be high, you need help organizing your returns, shipping, and exchanges. 

The best policy is to open about possible delays and provide updated information to your customers:

• Use a chatbot showing the latest orders and readily return statuses to the customer. 
• Provide a tracking number as soon as possible. 
• If it will take time to process the return, show customers the wait time and add them to a queue. 
• Provide a callback option to customers so that they don’t suffer from long wait times. 

Recent research shows that 63% of customers would rather get a callback than wait on hold. Similarly, research has shown that 70% of customers prefer having a self-service option like a chatbot on the brand website. 

Combining these two factors, it’s clear that providing clear information with a self-service option and enabling callback service will help you ace Black Friday customer service. 

This point also feeds into our next tip.

4. Create Templates and Answers for Agents

Despite automation, some inquiries will come to your agents. And given the large volume, they might still be burdened. This is where having readymade templates and answers will help. There are two ways to do this:

• Templates on Ticketing Platform – Most ticketing platforms allow you to set specific templates that you could use to answer a question. Use this feature liberally to answer common troubleshooting questions your customers may ask. 
• An AI Agent – Adding an AI chatbot internally can help agents answer more detailed questions quickly. These AI bots will search your database and find the correct answers so your agents can directly answer the questions. We’ve recently incorporated something like this called Agent Assist at Kommunicate.

Templates and some tech-based assistance to agents will help you resolve more queries faster. Also, remember our earlier point: if your agents have too much on their plate, it’s okay to convey that there will be wait times for them. 

Now that you have a clear communication and service strategy with the above points, it’s time to prepare contingencies.

5. Prepare Contingencies

Minor problems can often complicate customer service planning. As Von Moltke famously said, “No plan serves the first contact with the enemy.”

Multiple things can complicate your customer service process during a festival rush, so preparing for them is better. We recommend:

• Having Additional Agents on Standby – If the customer service messages get too overwhelming, it’s better to have some people on standby so that they can help with the rush hour volumes. 
• Ask for Overage Permissions – Some AI chatbot providers provide limited usage of their chatbots. In this case, asking them to keep serving the chatbot despite overage is essential to ensure a smooth service.
• Prioritize Tickets – An AI chatbot will help you reduce the number of inquiries an agent receives, but, more importantly, it will push the most critical tickets to the front of the line for your agents. This will help you solve critical issues before they become widespread problems. 

There are five tips you can use to improve the customer experience during the Black Friday sale. 

Conclusion

Black Friday is a massive opportunity for many businesses especially the ones in the Ecommerce industry. Millions of people wait for the festival season to lose their purse strings and grab the best deals possible. 

Since the season adds a lot of volume to customer support inquiries into businesses, planning your customer service processes around the event is essential. Most successful companies use a mixture of AI chatbots and additional workforce to deal with the volume while providing accurate and relevant information on every webpage. 

Bigger businesses also incorporate contingencies into their plan, providing up-to-date information about operational delays, return policies, and shipping dates. 

These simple strategies will improve the customer experience of the people visiting you to celebrate the holidays. 

Happy Black Friday!